The Happening
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
A better title for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening would be Nonsense. It’s like an amusement park ride that has no reason for being—and no meaning—besides visceral excitation. Only difference is that The Happening isn’t fun. The worst part of Shyamalan’s now familiar storytelling is that he lacks the wit to use his rudimentary filmmaking skills to give pleasure. Instead, he fatuously tries to give profundity—always based on naive sentiments about death; this time shyly evoking 9/11 alarm. It’s a gimmick that treats the audience as children.
To wit: The Happening’s story proper begins in a Philadelphia high school where science instructor Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is teaching the younguns. Shyamalan announces his theme—“It’s a part of nature we can never fully understand”—which is weirdly lackadaisical for a science class but sufficient for the cheap thrills that make up The Happening. After a Shock Cinema-style opening sequence where leisurely New Yorkers in Central Park unfathomably commit suicide, Shyamalan’s film is full of unexplained dread. It follows the exodus of frightened people who can’t figure out the sudden epidemic of death and malevolent nature. Some bad karma seems to waft in on the breeze—graphically illustrated by construction workers falling to their deaths like those devastating images of people leaping from the twin towers.
This pretends that we still don’t know what to make of 9/11’s shock. Stupidly non-political, Shyamalan twists the unease people felt about terrorism into Halloween spookiness: Elliott and his flibbertigibbet wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), traverse the Northeast corridor looking for ways to avoid the Whatever that has descended upon America. The ordeal comes down to a test that validates the couple’s marital commitment. Too bad Shyamalan believes in plot gimmickry more than he believes in love.
It is the concentration on cheap thrills that makes The Happening worse than just nonsense; it’s insulting nonsense. Whatever lesson there is to learn from 9/11—Life’s unfairness, the recognition of fate, the dumb panic of people in mobs, the fragility of civilization, the forgotten significance of love—is disrespected by Shyamalan’s trite narrative maneuvers. He uses road movie conventions when Elliott and Alma flee disaster and run into various forms of chaos, but it’s a road movie without enlightenment at the end. Their encounters with a neo-hippie holistic gardener, two uncomprehending teens and a fanatical hermit, dramatizes different stages of disbelief but no character’s behavior goes further than a trivialized panicky impulse.
Wahlberg’s Elliott never thinks up a scientific explanation of the mysterious euthanasia. Distracted by the revelation of his wife’s near-adultery, he becomes fixated on winning her back. (In Wahlberg’s best moment, Elliott tells an anecdote about “a superfluous bottle of cough syrup.”) This is where Shyamalan pretends to show “heart.” But if Shyamalan wasn’t such an infantile film-geek—if he’d seen some grown-up movies like Ingmar Bergman’s on-the-road, apocalyptic Shame—he might have enhanced Elliott’s personal dilemma into a larger human condition. No, Shyamalan simply falls back on “love”—a contrived, saccharine conclusion. But then rejects it. This is the worst kind of Hollywood manipulation; flip-flopping its superficial story elements (love, death, fear), obstructing hope and intelligence. Sequel anyone?
Something is immoral about the way Shyamalan’s reduces 9/11—citizens acting in terrified unison—to group-think, group-panic, mad-sheep disease. It betrays some contempt for the popular audience. An oft-repeated red-herring is the characters’ quasi-political fears. (“It appears to be a terrorist attack!” “Mother of god what kind of terrorists are these!” “The terrorists or whatever are watching the roads!” “Just when you thought there was no more evil that could be invented!”) These cries derive from actual 9/11 consternation. Yet, because the disquiet is made into genre convention, its truth is negated; implying that terrorists are nothing more than boogeymen. It’s a disgraceful denigration of real-world political fear into fright-night hysteria.
Last year, Frank Darabont’s The Mist presented a more credible allegory for 9/11, calibrating the minute ways that a community (a nation) breaks down following the onset of disaster. But with Shyamalan’s hack instincts, all behavior gets simplified to fear. As Elliott and his caravan pursue escape, Shyamalan shows off his fatuous technique: a low-level camera traces a cop, a cabbie and a woman blowing their brains out in a relay. Next, a phone-cam captures a man being dismembered, Monty Python-like, by lions in a Philly zoo. The big set-piece (based on the open field suspense of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest) indicates calamity by misdirection, showing nothing. It is a textbook example of inept mise en scene. Besides, the mass-murder conceit is offensive enough.
Blame all this ugly cleverness on Newsweek for crowning Shyamalan “The New Spielberg” in 1999. That’s what started the media hoax whereby the public’s shallow enjoyment of movies (and miscomprehension of Spielberg) was justified. Its impact was noticeable in reviews that trashed Spielberg’s War of the World, resenting its metaphoric/cathartic use of the 9/11 experience. Shyamalan’s movie—which is sheer exploitation—demonstrates the same banality that caused critics to fall for the cheap disaster-movie device of United 93. They’d rather profound experience be depicted lightly. It’s a form of moral, political and artistic retardation.
Shyamalan exemplifies the childish timidity that is the foundation of banal entertainment, movies that resolutely are not art. But it’s also a reflex of post-9/11 social shock and denial. Shyamalan is a perfect director for people who don’t want movies to disturb their comfort or ignorance. They complain that Spielberg had no right evoking 9/11, the same way dolts insist that Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center wasn’t political, that Hitchcock’s The Birds is trivial or that Godard’s Weekend went too far. Shyamalan aims and goes nowhere with The Happening, a title that dare not speak its fear.
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
A better title for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening would be Nonsense. It’s like an amusement park ride that has no reason for being—and no meaning—besides visceral excitation. Only difference is that The Happening isn’t fun. The worst part of Shyamalan’s now familiar storytelling is that he lacks the wit to use his rudimentary filmmaking skills to give pleasure. Instead, he fatuously tries to give profundity—always based on naive sentiments about death; this time shyly evoking 9/11 alarm. It’s a gimmick that treats the audience as children.
To wit: The Happening’s story proper begins in a Philadelphia high school where science instructor Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is teaching the younguns. Shyamalan announces his theme—“It’s a part of nature we can never fully understand”—which is weirdly lackadaisical for a science class but sufficient for the cheap thrills that make up The Happening. After a Shock Cinema-style opening sequence where leisurely New Yorkers in Central Park unfathomably commit suicide, Shyamalan’s film is full of unexplained dread. It follows the exodus of frightened people who can’t figure out the sudden epidemic of death and malevolent nature. Some bad karma seems to waft in on the breeze—graphically illustrated by construction workers falling to their deaths like those devastating images of people leaping from the twin towers.
This pretends that we still don’t know what to make of 9/11’s shock. Stupidly non-political, Shyamalan twists the unease people felt about terrorism into Halloween spookiness: Elliott and his flibbertigibbet wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), traverse the Northeast corridor looking for ways to avoid the Whatever that has descended upon America. The ordeal comes down to a test that validates the couple’s marital commitment. Too bad Shyamalan believes in plot gimmickry more than he believes in love.
It is the concentration on cheap thrills that makes The Happening worse than just nonsense; it’s insulting nonsense. Whatever lesson there is to learn from 9/11—Life’s unfairness, the recognition of fate, the dumb panic of people in mobs, the fragility of civilization, the forgotten significance of love—is disrespected by Shyamalan’s trite narrative maneuvers. He uses road movie conventions when Elliott and Alma flee disaster and run into various forms of chaos, but it’s a road movie without enlightenment at the end. Their encounters with a neo-hippie holistic gardener, two uncomprehending teens and a fanatical hermit, dramatizes different stages of disbelief but no character’s behavior goes further than a trivialized panicky impulse.
Wahlberg’s Elliott never thinks up a scientific explanation of the mysterious euthanasia. Distracted by the revelation of his wife’s near-adultery, he becomes fixated on winning her back. (In Wahlberg’s best moment, Elliott tells an anecdote about “a superfluous bottle of cough syrup.”) This is where Shyamalan pretends to show “heart.” But if Shyamalan wasn’t such an infantile film-geek—if he’d seen some grown-up movies like Ingmar Bergman’s on-the-road, apocalyptic Shame—he might have enhanced Elliott’s personal dilemma into a larger human condition. No, Shyamalan simply falls back on “love”—a contrived, saccharine conclusion. But then rejects it. This is the worst kind of Hollywood manipulation; flip-flopping its superficial story elements (love, death, fear), obstructing hope and intelligence. Sequel anyone?
Something is immoral about the way Shyamalan’s reduces 9/11—citizens acting in terrified unison—to group-think, group-panic, mad-sheep disease. It betrays some contempt for the popular audience. An oft-repeated red-herring is the characters’ quasi-political fears. (“It appears to be a terrorist attack!” “Mother of god what kind of terrorists are these!” “The terrorists or whatever are watching the roads!” “Just when you thought there was no more evil that could be invented!”) These cries derive from actual 9/11 consternation. Yet, because the disquiet is made into genre convention, its truth is negated; implying that terrorists are nothing more than boogeymen. It’s a disgraceful denigration of real-world political fear into fright-night hysteria.
Last year, Frank Darabont’s The Mist presented a more credible allegory for 9/11, calibrating the minute ways that a community (a nation) breaks down following the onset of disaster. But with Shyamalan’s hack instincts, all behavior gets simplified to fear. As Elliott and his caravan pursue escape, Shyamalan shows off his fatuous technique: a low-level camera traces a cop, a cabbie and a woman blowing their brains out in a relay. Next, a phone-cam captures a man being dismembered, Monty Python-like, by lions in a Philly zoo. The big set-piece (based on the open field suspense of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest) indicates calamity by misdirection, showing nothing. It is a textbook example of inept mise en scene. Besides, the mass-murder conceit is offensive enough.
Blame all this ugly cleverness on Newsweek for crowning Shyamalan “The New Spielberg” in 1999. That’s what started the media hoax whereby the public’s shallow enjoyment of movies (and miscomprehension of Spielberg) was justified. Its impact was noticeable in reviews that trashed Spielberg’s War of the World, resenting its metaphoric/cathartic use of the 9/11 experience. Shyamalan’s movie—which is sheer exploitation—demonstrates the same banality that caused critics to fall for the cheap disaster-movie device of United 93. They’d rather profound experience be depicted lightly. It’s a form of moral, political and artistic retardation.
Shyamalan exemplifies the childish timidity that is the foundation of banal entertainment, movies that resolutely are not art. But it’s also a reflex of post-9/11 social shock and denial. Shyamalan is a perfect director for people who don’t want movies to disturb their comfort or ignorance. They complain that Spielberg had no right evoking 9/11, the same way dolts insist that Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center wasn’t political, that Hitchcock’s The Birds is trivial or that Godard’s Weekend went too far. Shyamalan aims and goes nowhere with The Happening, a title that dare not speak its fear.
